Category: Uncategorized

At the start of 2018 I made a conscious choice to read more books and consume less social media. As has become increasingly clear over the past couple of years, social media is consuming the individuals that use it, rather than the other way round (the average time spent on social media globally per day…

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has begun to migrate to Amsterdam. The relationship the UK will have with EMA is up in the air, but already the changes are having an effect on the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) work. They are beginning to fail to win new contracts for and lose…

Should you spend time arguing with anti-vaccine lobby on the internet? After all, someone is always wrong on the internet and duty calls. A paper analysing a retrospective set of 1.8 million tweets suggests caution is required.1 David Broniatowski and colleagues examined vaccine-related tweets in this sample, and compared how normal users posted vaccine messages…

Communicating the positive harm-benefit of vaccines is complex. Vaccination scares cause real harm. As one example, let’s take measles vaccination. Vaccination with measles occurs through the administration of MMR vaccine. Vaccination rates in many European states do not provide herd immunity against measles. Data from The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. This leads…

The use of medicines always comes with risks, but your individual risk may vary based on your physiology, you gender, your genetics, and your behaviour. Although much of the focus on drug use in athletes concerns performance enhancement, drug use by athletes can be associated with risks even if not a performance enhancing drug. Non…

Alternative medicines are dangerous. Complementary medicines are dangerous. The thought patterns surrounding them are dangerous; homeopathy has an association with anti-vaccine stances. Pharmacy’s engagement in homeopathy is in the main through the stocking of a side line of homeopathic products, rather than full homeopathic practice. In the UK this leads to controversies and campaigns, such as…